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Belly
I saddened when I read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, published in 2004, because it is exemplary of women’s self-hatred. Unlike lots of women, I found The Vagina Monologues, the play by Ensler through which she became famous and which was first performed in 1996, disappointing for the same reason–the clearly stated and unremitting repugnance that women feel for their bodies.
In The Good Body Ensler tells her own truth, in her early 50s, which is the truth of many women: she hates her body. Like them, she thinks that a particular part of her is the ugliest and thinks about excising it, sometimes actually, sometimes in imagination. Although Ensler knows that she, like other women, is “my own victim, my own perpetrator,” she lets her body humiliate her.
Ensler fears narcissism as she reveals her obsession with her belly, as if narcissism is always a negative quality and, being that, is also the obvious companion of self-obsession. The first definition of narcissism in the fourth edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary is simply “self-love”–no qualifications. Then follows “interest, often excessive interest, in one’s own appearance, comfort, importance, abilities, etc.” Seems to me that interest in oneself is healthy! A deep and compassionate interest rather than the simultaneously critical and aggrandizing self-interest that describes unhealthy narcissism. The “excessive” part rings a bell for most people when they hear the word “narcissism,” but people can choose–to hear something different from “excessive” and to understand narcissism as a range of behavior, from extreme self-absorption to loving self-acceptance. Without some healthy narcissism, acting in the world is an isolating and bleak affair. “Narcissist” is cant, a catchword putdown applied to women who really do like their bodies. Cant distorts our lives so that we become uneasy in them. Conscious rewording can create easier living by helping people to recognize how they represent themselves. Linguistic self-representation can initiate a person’s understanding of her beliefs about herself and through that, her changing them.
It’s safe for women to say how much the culture in which they live hates the female body and to focus on that negativity, because the culture itself approves. Sheila Jeffreys takes that focus in her book Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Practices in the West, published in 2005. Her passionate scholarship is effective, but the distance of her tone and argument from the pleasures of health and harmony troubles me. Because of the same cultural approval, it’s safe, too, for women to say that they hate their own bodies and to focus on their disbelief in their own beauty. In The Good Body Ensler speaks of her “deadly self-hatred.” I respect her honesty, but I wish that she had put it in the service of bloom and glow, which harmony and health sustain.
In Six Names of Beauty, the philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell’s examination of various cultures’ words for beauty and his ideas about it, he defines the English word beauty as “the object of longing,” and he associates beauty with loss. When I taught his book in my Beauty and the Body course I did not hide my displeasure with that association. I court different words for beauty, ones that Sartwell also discusses: the Hebrew yapha, which he defines as “glow, bloom,” and the Navajo hozho, which he defines as “health, harmony.” We can understand yapha and hozho as processes not only as qualities, never absolutely achieved and therefore unlike the virtues of (purported) paragons of beauty that fashion, cinema, and other style, art, and entertainment vehicles of the new and the supposedly necessary thrust into our view.
Ensler’s and Jeffreys’s books are indicative of the marketing in both academia and the wider culture of women’s accommodation to cultural norms of self-cruelty. As Ensler puts it, “In order to be good, I’ve got to be a smiling psychopath.” Women-must-be-modest keeps women of all ages stuck in the conformity to a goodness that is petty rather than simple, as in elegant, that is perversely humble and unrefined by self-love.
Ensler admits, “When my partner rubs my stomach I want to vomit. When he says, ‘I love your tummy,’ it seems obscene.” Like Ensler’s partner, a man said to me a few years after I’d read The Good Body, “I love your tummy.” Tummy felt infantalizing to me. I prefer belly. Its earthiness is glamorous. Belly is a real part of my body whereas tummy feels unattached. At any rate, I know that women are supposed to hate their stomachs–we are offered a myriad of exercise and diet “solutions” in print and online–and my belly curves, like a healthy, slender girl’s. I consciously reworded that man’s compliment (in my mind), changing tummy to belly. I was happy with his admiration of my stomach, so I breathed fully and let my belly be itself, and I saw my body through his eyes, in the lacy, peach-colored thong panties that he had bought for me, and I appreciated why he stared at my belly and made an erotic observation that meant something like this: being directly above the pubis, the belly is a visual entry into a woman’s genitalia. Nothing obscene about that! I’d call it primal aesthetics.
- July 28, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 3
very interesting. helen caldicott, in missile envy, talked about how americans during the cold war would talk about the “soft underbelly of the Soviet Union.”
This was a beautiful read, thank you.
A bit of a digression: I am reminded of the Nora Ephron bestselling book “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman” which I encouraged women not to buy from the bookstore I worked for at the time of its release. Have you heard of this book? Ay yay yay. I am pretty hard on Ms. Ephron’s movies and humor; I find that her jokes for women are *on* women, women’s bodies and aging are the projected joke/misery. So her writing is well-received because she can dare to say depressing supposedly funny things like, that she hates her neck (although she doesn’t say “hate,” see even the hatred of herself is careful to behave).
I would say, “Do you really want this stupid title on your bookshelf?” as I was checking people out with Ephron’s book (it was only ever women). One customer said, No, you’re right! And walked out, bookless, made my week.
I read about the Ephron book and didn’t want to read it. Agreeing with you, do we need yet another book, by anyone, about women’s self-hatred? Yay for your forthright question to women who thought they wanted to purchase the book.